If you ask many people, 2016 has been an unmitigated disaster — besides the obvious European and American political situations, there have been celebrity deaths galore, Zika, and a dead gorilla that became the most annoying and obnoxious Internet meme in recent memory. And while all these may be perfectly valid reasons for concern, depending on who you are, where you live, and what kind of music you like/what celebrities you idolize, I can’t personally claim to have had a bad year myself.

This blog is about none of those things though, and in fact, 2016 was pretty amazing for me — I got married and then honeymooned in Hong Kong, I saw many of my friends and in-laws also get married, Overwatch was released and promptly swallowed up my free time, the Cubs won the World Series, The Grand Tour finally premiered, and my sister got engaged just over a week ago. In the AMV world, things were equally good — we got an AMV Discord set up that continues to be active on a daily basis, NDK was a blast this year, I released two solid videos that I am genuinely proud of, I made significant and important progress on the Genome Project, and AMV Central was finally launched, with promises to grow more and more in the coming months and years (hopefully, anyway). So I hope you’ll forgive me for not lamenting the year the way many others are right now — I have a lot to talk about, and I want to send this year off in joy, rather than sorrow.

As has become usual at this time of year, I will be doing a retrospective on various things that I discovered and enjoyed throughout 2016. Unlike most other typical end-of-the-year lists that you can find elsewhere across the Internet, many of the following posts will not be strictly about things that were released in 2016 — for several of the posts, I will be talking about things that I first discovered this last year, regardless of when they were originally released or created. I will, of course, cap off this series of posts with my usual AMV list — which will be restrained to AMVs released in 2016.

I’ll say nothing of the content of the posts coming up, to keep you all in unbearable suspense, but if you wish to follow this, I’ll have these posts scheduled to go up at 7:00 PM Central time, one per day every day, from now through January 4th. I sincerely hope you enjoy reading or skimming through this stuff over the next week and a half — this has become, bar none, my favorite time of year for the sole reason of making these lists and writing about all this stuff. I love it, and I hope you not just enjoy reading, but ideally discovering some cool stuff that you didn’t know about before.